President's Message: More Eyes on County Officials will Expedite Progress at the Negotiations Table By Carlos Clayton, CAPE President

Is the County’s lack of preparation and poor responsiveness at this year's negotiations table frustrating for CAPE’s and the Coalition of County Union’s (CCU) negotiation teams? Absolutely!

Should it stop us from pursuing our goals of securing fair salary and fringe benefit contracts? Never!

Based on how the Unit contract negotiations went this year, and how the Fringe Benefit contract negotiations have progressed thus far, it seems as if County officials managed to forget the contributions of County professional employees towards helping the County thrive through the worst economic recession in generations, going nearly 5 years without pay raises. We've done more work with fewer people. We’ve watched the ranks of department managers expand while line-level positions are lost to attrition and contracting out. We’ve seen the County’s reserves grow in each of the last few years, indicating the County’s financial condition is recovering from the recessionary period.

With all of these factors in the mix, we would expect the County’s representatives to have come to the contract bargaining tables with something to say. Unfortunately for us, they didn’t. In fact, they didn’t even have a response for most of our proposals. The responses they did bring were mostly rejections without any justification for saying ‘no’ other than that the County “has no interest at this time” in our proposals.

It doesn’t take much intelligence or experience to come to the conclusion that contract negotiations of any kind are impossible if one side fails to engage. County officials were less engaged this year than ever. If this pattern continues, eventually they might just fail to show up.

During this year’s Unit contract negotiations, County representatives rejected nearly all of our union’s proposals to improve working conditions and the quality of services provided to Los Angeles County residents and businesses. After countless exchanges with management at each of the CAPE Units’ negotiating tables, it was clear that nobody on management’s side was interested in our proposals to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the County's operations.

We can’t force more cooperative labor-management relations onto County management officials. They have to decide for themselves whether they want to inspire or demoralize their workforce. As long as they choose the latter, we'll continue to do our best to provide information that calls out County managers for their lack of preparation and response to the serious issues impacting CAPE members and the services we provide.